This invention relates to a raised panel paneling system, and more particularly to such a paneling system which utilizes flat sheets of paneling board which may be readily secured to a substrate (e.g., drywall) and which may have a variety of styles and shapes of stiles and rails applied thereto so as to give the appearance of full depth raised panel paneling.
Conventionally, raised panel wall or ceiling paneling typically consisted of panel sections made of lumber which was precisely milled to fit together to form the panel sections. These panel sections were so milled and assembled as to visually enhance the fact that they were made of solid lumber. The three-dimensional aspects of the solid lumber paneling sections were accentuated. The panel sections were held together on a wall by a series of vertical stiles and horizontal rails so as to frame around the paneling sections and so as to further enhance the depth perception of the raised panel paneling system. Such conventional prior art paneling systems were expensive because of the amount of wood required to give the appearance of depth or thickness. However, extensive amounts of labor were required for the fabrication of the prior solid wood panel sections, stiles, and rails. Still further, each job was, in essence, a custom job requiring substantial amounts of skilled carpentry labor for proper installation and fit.
In more recent years, substrate wood paneling has become commercially popular. Oftentimes, better grades of such paneling consisted of a substrate of plywood construction typically having a maximum size of about four feet by eight feet, and having a quarter inch thickness. Oftentimes, a high quality hardwood veneer was bonded to one side of the panel substrate. These large sheets of paneling were then secured to furring strips or the like on the walls of a room, and the bottoms of the panel were finished with a horizontal baseboard, and the tops were finished relative to the ceiling by means of a crown molding member. While these sheet paneling systems were considerably less expensive than the prior art solid wood, custom made raised paneling systems, they did not give the impression of three-dimensional depth as was associated with the prior art raised paneling systems.
Also, with sheet paneling systems, it is often necessary to cut the panels in lengthwise or heightwise direction so as to enable the paneling to precisely fit along a wall on which it is to be installed. It will be appreciated that if the substrate panels are uniformly four feet wide, and if the wall of the room on which they are to be installed is, for example, 14 feet, 6 inches in length, it requires substantial cutting and fitting to make the sheet substrate paneling to fit the room precisely without unsightly seams or joints between the panels and without requiring numerous panels of varying widths to panel the wall surface.
Certain prior wall paneling systems have utilized vertical stiles and horizontal rails in combination with the substrate wall paneling sheets so as to enhance the three-dimensional appearance of the wall paneling system. However, in many instances, where the vertical stiles abut against the horizontal rails, it is necessary to cope the upper and lower ends of the vertical stiles so as to provide a coped joint between the stiles and the rails. Because the vertical dimensions of a wall paneling system may vary somewhat in a room due to varying heights of the wall to the floor from one side of a wall to the other, unevenness of ceilings, and other dimensional variations, it is often necessary to make these coped joints between the stiles and the rails in the field. However, it is difficult to form a coped joint in the field both because precise dimensions and expensive wood-shaping equipment are required. It will be appreciated that it is oftentimes difficult and takes highly skilled labor to precisely fit and measure wood paneling in the field as it is being installed. Further, expensive wood-shaping equipment required for coped joints is often quite heavy, cumbersome, and expensive such that it is difficult, if not impossible, to have such equipment readily available at the job site.
Thus, there has been a long-standing need for a paneling system, particularly a wall paneling system, which has many of the low cost advantages of sheet paneling, which avoids the necessity of coped joints, and yet has the aesthetically pleasing three-dimensional qualities of full depth, solid wood raised paneling.